Set Fire To The Rain

Calling in Dead

Noe

Present Day

November 2000

'You're not going in there,' I told myself, gazing at the firehouse through my side mirror. 'You walk in there and it's all over. Man up and just tell her you forgot the goddamn camera in your locker. Whatever you tell her, you're still a dead man.'

They pushed me to this.

With only ten days of approved vacation time, I was left four days shy of my original request.

I'm a star employee.

I never miss work.

I always take an extra shift when they need me.

The least they could have done was give me a few more days for bending over without complaint. All I wanted was some decent alone time with my wife. That's all I ever asked for. They couldn't just give me that. They had to push me. They shut the door in my face.

I needed those four days. It was a do it or die kind of deal. There was no way I could tell my wife that our long awaited (and twice postponed honeymoon) would be cut short by work.

I couldn't do that to her again.

I was put in a desperate situation, and I began to come up with desperate excuses.

A bad case of pneumonia.

That was the best I could come up with on the spot. The kind of pneumonia that knocks a grown man off his feet, leaves him coughing up coffee grounds all night.

You don't fuck with that kind of pneumonia, I told the higher-ups, and if I didn't get the time off I needed to rest, I was going straight down and taking the whole firehouse with me.

I knew I was playing with fire. I held one of about 2,500 firefighter positions in the department, for which, every 4 years or so, there were at least 7,000 applications from guys trying to fill them. Though the department was family to me, I knew how competitive it was, and how quick as a heartbeat I could be replaced.

And they would never take my word for it.

With the length of my request, and the struggle finding guys to fill shifts, they wanted proof that I was ill.

They looked for every reason to doubt the strict bed-rest orders I handed over to them. They searched my face for authenticity, or a sign that I had chalked up a favor with the nurse down at the clinic.

She's always had a thing for me.

I got to remember to send her flowers after all this.

And after giving them my best puppy-dog face for the duration of a tense 5 minute stare-down, I guess they finally took pity on me.

Either that, or they just wanted me out of their goddamn office.

All that to say, my grammy performance took home the award.

The guy signed my paper, and then taking one more look at me, squirted a generous amount of hand sanitizer into his palms.

Just to be safe.

So, having gotten my 14 days vacation and some, it didn't take a genius to figure out that walking into that firehouse after all that my bleating sounded a lot like the absolute worst case of catching something worse than pnemonia, especially with the chief's Roadmaster guarding the flagpole outside.

I turned the ignition of my truck and put it into reverse, deciding I was better off breaking it to my wife gently.

Maybe I could probably pull it off with a little tact.